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by Alona



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-26
Updated: 2010-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 03:11:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which things go according to plan, though Alcibiades is sure it isn't his plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [thehoyden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehoyden/gifts).



Caius Greylace was asleep on the couch in the front room of my suite. For such a dainty little freak, he slept a whole lot like an undignified drunkard. Right now, he had his head tucked under one arm, like some crazy bird. The other arm was flung out, palm up and bent back so all the veins stood out in his skinny wrist. One leg was pulled up to his chest. The other was propped up on the little gilded side table, the one whose engravings had sent Caius into raptures the first time he'd seen them. When I'd dared to drape my travel-stained jacket over it, his reaction had made me fear for life and limb. Now here he was, treating it like a common footstool. Hypocrisy, I thought, not for the first time, ran as deeply as madness in the Greylace blood.

He had to be awake by now. Bitter experience had taught me what a light sleeper he was, especially given the right stimulus. And what better stimulus could there be than me returning late from yet another in an endless stream of mutual ass-kissing sessions at th’Esar’s palace, wanting nothing better than to be left alone until I had slept for a solid ten hours? Thremedon tired me out faster and harder than any other place, and Caius knew it, had had two weeks to watch it at work. That was, of course, why he was here instead of in his own perfectly good townhouse. How he kept getting in when I had threatened the staff in every way I knew of was, unfortunately, not much of a mystery. Little Lord Greylace had explained it himself, with his usual habit of being perfectly, maddeningly right: "But, my dear, you're so unconvincing. If I only had your performance here to go on, I wouldn't believe you could hurt an insect."

There was no hope in ignoring him. I did it anyway, padding across the room as quietly as I could, bound for my bed.

"You aren't going to leave me here without a kiss good night, my dear General," he said, when I'd almost started to think, just this once, he'd let me be.

"I'm not in a forgiving mood, Greylace," I said. "Keep quiet or get out." I regretted that _or_ as soon as it came out of my mouth, and I would live to be haunted by it.

I kept walking, but I'd broken my stride. A few steps from my bedroom door I felt the brush of fingertips on my arm. Tensing, I looked down. There he was, at my side, without the least noise or fuss or apparent transition between lolling in a heap and standing there, looking offensively awake and alert. But his hair was disarranged, the ruined eye staring blankly at me along with the living one. He was going to less and less trouble to keep it hidden from me. Not something I viewed as a good sign.

“Move,” I growled, shrugging off his hand, which rested careless and light on my arm, as though he was skimming over some prize in his collection in all the security of ownership.

He smiled, darting his hand back and folding it up with the other one. Looking anywhere but at his eye, I stopped on his still swollen cheek, bulging all out of alignment with the rest of his face. He caught me looking and prodded the swelling with a fingertip, wincing slightly, for my benefit, I knew, not because it hurt. The smile grew.

 

It was four days since I'd punched him for trying to kiss me. The only surprising thing about that, I had thought later, was that he hadn’t tried it any earlier. We'd been back in Volstov nearly two months. Since then, as I remembered only too well, we'd spent barely a week far enough apart for my peace of mind, when his summons to the capital had come a week ahead of mine.

On that day, we'd spent several hours in his study, reviewing a draft for an official summary of the Ke-Han diplomatic mission and trying to get our memories of it to agree. I had been getting frustrated, and there had been a monster of a headache sneaking up on me. When Caius, for whatever reason it was that Caius saw fit to do anything, had leaned over the table and put his lips to mine, I'd done the only thing I could.

He had rocked back just a little and held up the back of his hand to the corner of his mouth. It had come away stained red with blood, which he had carefully licked off, the other side of his mouth rising up in a sharp, satisfied smirk.

“I see you’re feeling restive,” he'd said, his speech a bit thick, a bit slurred. “It must be all this staying indoors and fiddling with paperwork. Yes, I know you miss the open air and the rolling countryside and dear Yana’s most filling meals. I miss them all, too.” He had wrinkled his nose. “Well, perhaps not so much the meals as the rest, if you’ll pardon me.”

Then, as though nothing had happened, he had picked up a pen and pointed to another line in the report, asking me what my recollection of that meeting was. And I'd let him. Maybe, just maybe, I'd felt sorry for hitting him as hard as I had. A stupid, useless feeling.

 

Caius had clearly chosen keeping quiet over getting out, and it was my fault for giving him the choice in the first place. Still, he was here now, and no less irritating for being quiet. I did, again, what seemed to be the only thing I could do.

Why that should have been to grab Caius by the shoulders, slam him against a wall, and stick my tongue into his mouth was something I could figure out much, much later. Somewhere around the time I remembered how to think in complete sentences.

Caius, without even a token gesture of resistance, slipped one arm around my waist and anchored his other hand in the hair at the nape of my neck so firmly that it ached. He pulled me closer to him, pressing our bodies together. I was the one bearing down on him with all my considerably greater weight, but from that moment I couldn't shake the feeling that he was the one who was in control and knew, really had known all along, what was happening.

That shot a bolt of clarity through my head. I pulled back, just as far as I could without getting a hunk of my scalp ripped off. In the stillness I could hear my own ragged breathing. Caius was looking up at me through his eyelashes, his face so full of triumph that for a moment I wanted to punch him again. Instead, I put my hand under his chin and angled his head up. His look changed to one of pure glee. There was a flush staining his cheeks and nose in deep pink blotches. Through my fingers, where they dug into the flesh of his throat, I could feel his pulse, wild and rapid. There was also the bone of his sharp little jaw, most of it fitting neatly into my open palm. I imagined how little force it'd take to crush it.

But instead I leaned down to kiss him again, a little more purposefully this time, feeling for sore points with my tongue, the little cuts and bruises I knew would hurt most, like it was my own mouth, and I was feeling for a sore tooth, poking it out of morbid fascination. And so bastion help me, he moaned. Not his usual complaining mew, but something deeper and richer, a noise I wouldn’t have guessed had come from him if the evidence hadn’t been right in front of me.

Then I knew that all I wanted to do, against all sanity and common sense, was to scoop Caius up and dump him on my bed -- which, I remembered, was only a few steps away. Even in this state I couldn’t exactly think about what would happen next, but I was sure that Caius would know. This was, after all, his own scheme. Of course.

Things went hazy after that. Or really, I let them go hazy, because a perfectly rational and correct horror was rising up in me, and I had no good answers for it, only terrible and guilty answers that I couldn’t admit in so many words and wanted to escape from having to consider. And escape I did.

 

Caius Greylace was asleep in my bed, like a drunkard, like a bird, like the world’s most contented and untroubled cat that had gotten the cream, the canary, and first pick of a batch of newly-hatched chicks.

Like someone who had stolen all the covers and left me shivering. Before I dealt with any of the other problems that were now looming in the very near future, I could deal with this one.


End file.
